The Fat Years

by Koonchung Chan

  “That was precisely our goal.”

  “Once you’d achieved your goal,” asked Lao Chen, “why didn’t you stop?”

  “With things going so well, why would we stop? What’s wrong with having the whole population happy and maintaining a harmonious society? China today has the highest happiness index in the world. Religious believers are rapidly increasing while domestic violence and the suicide rate for rural women are noticeably declining … What’s wrong with all that? And besides, we really don’t dare to stop now. If we do, the people might grow unhappy. Some foreigners who’ve lived in China for a long time begin to feel very strange when they go home. They don’t feel as happy as they did in China, and they always want to come back. We have a great many international friends like them! When other foreigners criticize China, they stand up and defend us, telling their compatriots that if they went to live in China for a while, they’d see that the Chinese people are the happiest in the world.”

  “Not everyone has the same reaction,” said Fang Caodi. “There are four of us here who have never been controlled by your drugged water.”

  “I’m telling you,” said He Dongsheng, “this is a good drug, but it’s only a minor drug. There’s no way it can control people. It just changes their feelings a bit. Whatever the people have to do, they can still do it. Our follow-up studies indicate that over ninety-nine percent of people have the same positive reaction, but perhaps there is an extremely small number of people who for some reason or another don’t have any reaction. It’s good enough that the great majority feel happy, because any minority will have their emotions influenced by the majority. Of course, there are some exceptions among the exceptions. I can see that you all belong to the extremely small minority made up of an extremely small number of people who remain unhappy. Just like me! I deliberately don’t drink our Chinese water or other beverages, just to experience what it feels like to see everybody else high when I’m sober. But today I ‘fell off the wagon,’ as the Americans say. The effect is best the first time. Just look how much I talked after I drank a couple of glasses of your tap water. I’ve talked so much … including telling you all sorts of things I never should have.”

  “When did you start putting Ecstasy in the water?” the hitherto silent Zhang Dou suddenly asked. “Exactly what day was it?”

  “The exact day is very clear,” answered He Dongsheng, beginning to cough. “It was the last day of the three-week crackdown. On that day, the water works of all first-, second-, and third-level cities and all provincial cities put it in the drinking water at the same time. That was because we were going to officially announce the start of China’s Age of Ascendancy the next day and we had to properly calibrate the people’s emotions.”

  “I’ll kill you, you bastard!” shouted Zhang Dou. He sprang onto He Dongsheng and pressed He’s feeble body down into the chair with the full weight of his hulking frame. “I’ll kill you, you bastard!”

  The others frantically tried to pull him off, but Zhang Dou was too strong and they couldn’t restrain him.

  “Zhang Dou, let him go! Are you mad?” the three of them shouted.

  He Dongsheng was making choking noises. His face had gone a deep red.

  “He hurt Miaomiao! He’s the bastard who poisoned Miaomiao!” shouted Zhang Dou with his hands closing around He Dongsheng’s throat. It looked like he was going to choke He Dongsheng to death right there in front of them.

  Suddenly Miaomiao gave a big scream. Zhang Dou loosened his grip on He Dongsheng and turned to look at her. Miaomiao was standing in the doorway with a plate of cookies in her hand; she was glaring at Zhang Dou. Zhang Dou climbed off gingerly.

  He had almost murdered their hostage, and the other three were very shaken. He Dongsheng, rescued from the grip of death, still had not caught his breath and was struggling to speak.

  “He’s the one who poisoned Miaomiao,” repeated Zhang Dou. “Miaomiao started to act strange, like she was sick, the day the crackdown ended, and it was all because they put that shit in the water.”

  “You’re mad! You’re all stark raving mad! You …” gasped He Dongsheng hoarsely. For a moment he thought he’d just dare them to kill him and get it over with, but his logic took hold and he decided that daring these kidnappers to do such a thing might not be in his best interests.

  Lao Chen was still the most cool-headed. He approached He Dongsheng with a glass of water, but He Dongsheng looked away. “I’ll untie you so you can drink some water, okay?” Lao Chen said gently.

  He Dongsheng was somewhat moved. Lao Chen loosened the rope. “What just happened was unplanned,” he said, “whether you believe it or not. The roosters are just about to crow and then it’ll be light. Your long dark night is about over. Just be patient a little while longer, all right? Do you have any more questions to ask?” Lao Chen addressed the other three while he helped pour water into He Dongsheng’s dry throat.

  “Yes. I almost forgot,” said Fang Caodi. “That lost month. Or, strictly speaking, that lost twenty-eight days. Professor He, the one week of anarchy and the three-week crackdown that you just told us about—except for the three of us and you, everyone I’ve asked about it doesn’t remember that time. Lao Chen, you don’t remember either, do you?”

  “I really don’t have any memory at all,” answered Lao Chen.

  He Dongsheng started to laugh—a sort of gurgling from his throat—it was still hard for him to talk. “I’d like another glass of water,” he said as he swallowed to clear his throat.

  “Professor He,” pressed Fang Caodi, “can you explain it to us? That year when everyone was given a bird flu vaccination. It was really a drug created by the Office of Stability Maintenance to make us all forget, right?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” corrected He Dongsheng. “The bird flu vaccination was to prevent bird flu, and only ten or twenty million people were actually vaccinated. Where would the Office of Stability Maintenance find such an amazing amnesiac drug? It would be wonderful if we did have one. Then our Communist Party could rewrite its history any way it wanted to.”

  “Then what was the real reason why everyone forgot?” asked Fang Caodi.

  “Was it the Ecstasy in the water?” asked Little Xi.

  “How should I know?” He Dongsheng began to laugh again, a genuine, mirthful laugh. “If you ask me for the real reason, I can only tell you that I haven’t a clue! Don’t think we can control everything. Many things happen that are beyond our expectations. We never dreamed that the month you’re talking about would just disappear from people’s memories.”

  “If you don’t know, then who does?” asked Fang Caodi. “Don’t try to keep anything from us …”

  “I’m not trying to hide anything. Let me tell you everything I know. After the ‘Action Plan for Achieving Prosperity amid Crisis’ began to meet with some success, the first sentence in a People’s Daily editorial was ‘Since the global economy has entered a period of crisis, China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy has officially begun …’ It was only editorial rhetoric to put these two events together in the same sentence. After that, the sentence was picked up. It ricocheted across the media until everybody could recite it by heart.

  “At that time, the Central Propaganda Bureau issued another report that mention of the intervening twenty-eight days was dwindling, even on the Internet. We thought people couldn’t stand to remember those hard times, and everyone was too busy making and spending money.

  “This was very good for the Party. Anarchy and suppression are not exactly splendid states—they’re bloody affairs, even sinful, if you’re a religious person. So the Propaganda Bureau took advantage of the situation and forbade all news media, including the Internet, from discussing those twenty-eight days. You know China’s Internet-control techniques are the best in the world, and of course the traditional media wouldn’t dare disobey our orders. Besides that, after China’s prosperity and ascendancy began, everybody lost interest in the West. Now the Chinese people prefer to
watch our own colorful media, and only a tiny minority still watch non-Chinese media sources. In this way those already rarely discussed twenty-eight days completely disappeared from our public discourse.

  “And then something unimaginable happened that to this day I still cannot fathom: more and more people genuinely forgot those twenty-eight days, and it was not just temporary memory loss, but they absolutely could not remember that time, just as though the whole country had unconsciously erased some painful childhood trauma.

  “People in middle age and above had not really forgotten the earlier Cultural Revolution and June 4, 1989. It was just that during these two years of China’s ascendancy, everybody was living very well and very few people had any interest in recalling the Cultural Revolution and June 1989, so those memories just naturally faded away.

  “But people were really unable to remember those twenty-eight days. Whether this was related to the water or not, I can’t say for sure. The leaders living in Zhongnanhai have their own drinking water. We don’t drink what the rest of the people drink, although there might have been a few of us without sufficient self-discipline who went around drinking ordinary water, I can’t say for certain. What I can tell you is that most of the leaders in Zhongnanhai can definitely recall those twenty-eight days, and they are also fully aware that the whole nation is suffering from a form of both collective and selective amnesia.

  “When I first realized what was happening, I went around sounding out various groups, including mid- and low-level cadres and specialist scholars. Just as I expected, they really had no recollection of that time; it was like they had brainwashed themselves. It was all so strange, but it was definitely true.

  “It was for the best that they didn’t remember. The previous leadership group, having the blood of those twenty-eight days on their hands, was very eager for everyone to forget the events of that month. So they started to revise any materials that reported on that time. For example, they ordered that all newspapers in all public libraries should be in digital form only. We totally rewrote the history of those twenty-eight days. Most importantly, we brought the date that China’s ascendancy officially began forward to match the date that the global economy entered the period of crisis and stagflation, thus erasing the historical existence of that week of anarchy and those three weeks of harsh crackdown. No one objected to this distortion of reality, and practically no one even noticed it. Once in a while, when someone in or outside the country mentioned those events, we simply filtered them out. Very soon the new version of things became the only available version. To tell you the truth, even I was pretty surprised: how could the Chinese people so easily forget such events?

  “What I want to tell you is that, definitely, the Central Propaganda organs did do their work, but they were only pushing along a boat that was already on the move. If the Chinese people themselves had not already wanted to forget, we could not have forced them to do so. The Chinese people voluntarily gave themselves a large dose of amnesia medicine.”

  “Why?” asked Little Xi and Fang Caodi together. “Why did the Chinese people do it? How could they? There must be some explanation.”

  “Didn’t I tell you already,” insisted He Dongsheng. “I don’t know!”

  Little Xi and Fang Caodi were dumbfounded.

  “I’m quite puzzled, too,” added He Dongsheng, seeing that they were all speechless. “Real life isn’t like a detective novel, and everything doesn’t have a perfect explanation. I have to admit this is one big riddle that I can’t solve. It could be that human beings are simply forgetful animals and they long to forget some aspects of their history. It could be that the Chinese Communist Party is just plain lucky. It could be that the Chinese people deserve to be governed by the Communist Party, and sixty-plus years is still not enough. It could be a miracle, or the Chinese people’s common karma. Too bad I’m a materialist, otherwise I would certainly say that it was the Will of Heaven, that Heaven wants the Chinese Communist Party to go on governing. Heaven saved my Party!” He gave another deep laugh.

  Little Xi and Fang Caodi sat there expressionless and depressed. He Dongsheng looked victorious. Lao Chen sat there staring blankly at nothing. After a long while he regained his composure and saw that it was already growing light outside.

  “Brother Dongsheng, let me remind you again that we have all made a ‘live or die together’ pact. No one is going to reveal anything that was said here last night. That way we can continue living our ordinary lives and you can continue living your official-promotion-and-money-spinning life. You think it over carefully. People, if there’s nothing else, I’ll let Mr. He go home.”

  The others remained silent, so Lao Chen gently addressed their captive. “You can go now.”

  He Dongsheng hesitated for a moment, rose, felt his arms up and down, and walked slowly to the door. Then he turned around and said by way of justification, “You think I care about official promotion and making money? I do what I do for the sake of the nation and the people.”

  They all looked at him expressionlessly.

  “Believe it or not, as you wish,” added He Dongsheng serenely, and then he walked out the door. A few moments later, they heard his SUV drive away.

  Lao Chen, Little Xi, and Fang Caodi sat there in silence.

  They walked slowly outside into the dawn light.

  “I’d better go,” said Fang Caodi.

  “Fine,” said Lao Chen.

  “Can I give you a lift into town?” asked Fang Caodi.

  “No, thanks,” said Lao Chen. “It’s light now. Little Xi and I will go and catch a bus. You’d better get going.”

  Fang Caodi gave each one of them a hug, said his good-byes, climbed into his Jeep Cherokee, and drove off.

  “Master Chen,” asked Zhang Dou, “are we going to be in any trouble?”

  “I guess it’s a fifty-fifty chance,” said Lao Chen.

  Zhang Dou nodded.

  “Take good care of Miaomiao,” said Little Xi.

  The three of them hugged for a long time and said good-bye.

  “I have some friends on the Yunnan border,” Lao Chen said to Little Xi, “who have never had that small-small high feeling. Shall we go and visit them?”

  “If it’s no trouble,” Little Xi answered after a moment’s thought, “I’d like to bring my mother, too.”

  “No trouble at all,” said Lao Chen with a smile.

  The eastern sky was bright, and the two of them shaded their eyes as they walked arm in arm into the harsh light of day.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The Fat Years is a unique combination of a mystery novel with a realistic exposé of the political, economic, and social system of China as it is today, and will be for the foreseeable future.

  The novel posits a mystery while at the same time offering a social and political critique of the nation in which the mystery takes place. We don’t learn how the mystery came about or why until very near the end. In the meantime, there are several related questions: what happened during a spell of exactly twenty-eight days in the spring of 2011 when the government carried out one of the Chinese Communist Party’s periodic violent crackdowns? Why are most Chinese people unable to remember the violence and the economic panic of this crackdown? Or, in fact, any of the other even more violent episodes in the sixty-plus-year history of Chinese Communist Party rule?

  Some of the story may initially seem to follow a familiar theme: two people suddenly meet again, some twenty years after a period when they were spending a great deal of time together, which for them was in the liberal days of the mid- to late 1980s. At that time the male protagonist, Lao Chen, had been attracted to Little Xi, but nothing ever really happened between them. When he meets her again, he is once more intrigued by her, but she doesn’t trust anyone who trusts the party-state regime. Chen’s pursuit of Little Xi leads us through both the very significant underground Christian movement and a land-rights protection campaign that demonstrates the flexibility of local Party off
icials.

  The realistic exposé, with only one or two exaggerations, reveals the Chinese Communist party-state control system, and the Chinese Communist Party’s plans to replace the United States as the most dominant superpower in the world.

  The original title of the book could be literally translated as “China in the Ascendant,” and the novel is indeed primarily concerned with that subject. The main theme is that China is yet another “rough beast, its hour come round at last,” and what that may mean for the world and the Chinese people. This theme is in basic agreement with recent works of nonfiction, and also dovetails with many proposals by young ultranationalist Chinese and high officers in the Chinese armed forces who champion what can only be labeled as fascist ideas. It also reflects several recent warnings by old retired Party leaders who fear these ultranationalists and how they want China to develop.

  Unlike a work of nonfiction, however edifying, The Fat Years gives you a full taste of what it feels like to be one of the characters living in the “counterfeit paradise” that is China today. In its original form it was circulated throughout China among concerned Chinese intellectuals, students, and so on, jumping the Great Firewall of censorship. Probably many high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials have read it. The Chinese scholars who sent the novel to my wife, and many other Chinese intellectuals we’ve talked to, have all said that this book is “the best description of the way they live today.” I believe it is destined to become a classic in China in the Brave New World rather than the 1984 tradition. Less futuristic than Brave New World, the book is still prophetic and will long be relevant to our understanding of a modern dictatorship of the kind that exists in China today.

  In the realism of the novel’s character depictions, we meet a very wide spectrum of almost all the elements of China’s three hundred to four hundred million urban population. They include ultra-nationalist wannabe fascist students, professors, and Party officials (Wei Guo, Professors X, Y, & Z); “ordinary” professors, members of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), who conduct “ordinary” research (Hu Yan); well-heeled real estate moguls (Jian Lin) and high-ranking officials in the party-state apparatus to whom they are firmly tied by interest and blood relationships (He Dongsheng); editors, writers, and media types (Zhuang Zizhong and unnamed Reading Journal contributors); sons and daughters of “Red Aristocrats”—longtime loyal Party families—who serve the party-state’s interests at home and around the world (Ban Cuntou, Wen Lan); young people of the lumpen proletariat, some of them escapees from slave-labor camps (Zhang Dou); other young professionals who have dropped out of the state-controlled media (Miaomiao); leaders and their followers in the rapidly growing underground Christian movement (Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun); young and old netizens who argue for and against ultranationalism and government policies; foreigners who like Lao Chen have opted to live the good life in a communist dictatorship because it is a good life for them and it does not frighten them; high-priced female escorts and drug addicts who work in places with names like the Paradise Club, catering to the newly rich, the Party powerful, and foreigners (Dong Niang and her boyfriend); youthful dissidents who protested and then escaped abroad or went silent after the Tiananmen Massacre (Shi Ping); and, finally, professional dissidents like Little Xi who refuse to accept the party-state’s version of past, present, and future reality; she is joined by the older, more experienced peripatetic cook and small-time entrepreneur Fang Caodi, and Zhang Dou, the young escapee from slave labor.